I think it would be hard to steer clear of pasta with kids. Before our children were born, I think Scott and I might have fixed some sort of Italian dish a couple times a month. With Elizabeth and Rachel, I buy my weight in noodle-type products. So I was hunting through my recipes for SOMETHING other than mac and cheese or spaghetti and ran across my mom's recipe for Lasagna Roll-ups. I tweeked it a little bit with a healthier cheese mixture I found in an old La Leche League cookbook**, plus added spinach and ground turkey. This got a 100% child approval rating in our house. Let me know what you think!
Healthier Lasagna Roll-ups
Begin your pot of water boiling and cook up one box of lasagna noodles. Brown your turkey in a pan and add one can or jar of spaghetti sauce, one chopped onion, one (defrosted and drained) box of chopped spinach, and any additional seasonings you might like (I added salt and pepper and garlic powder). Let this cook up while your noodles finish.
In a blender, mix 2 C cottage cheese, 2 eggs, 1/2 C grated Parmesan cheese and 4 T parsley.
Drain your noodles and pull out your pans (I used one 9x13 pan and one 8x8 Pyrex dish). Spread a bit of your tomato sauce around the bottom of the pan. Make yourself a clean workstation to work the noodles. Lay out a single noodle and take a spoonful of the cheese mixture and spread it along the full length. Then, roll it up so that it looks like a pinwheel. Place on top of the sauce. with seam-side down Continue this until you've used all the noodles. Pour the remaining sauce over all your little bundles and then top with Mozzarella cheese and some additional Parmesan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Enjoy!
**
Siddons, K. (1981). Kathy's Lasagne. In R. Johnson (Ed.), Whole Foods for the Whole Family - La
Leche League International Cookbook (pp. 200). Illinois: La Leche League.
You may be able to take the girl out of the mass comm lab, but you can't take the APA style book out of the girl... ;)
You may be able to take the girl out of the mass comm lab, but you can't take the APA style book out of the girl... ;)
Yum!!!
ReplyDeleteMy mom used to make those for me when I was a kid and I LOVED THEM! She would only add spinach and then throw in some nutmeg, oh YUM! Good find!
ReplyDeleteWe're giving this one a try this week! I'll let you know how it goes. And I LOVE your footnote (and accompanying "explanation" for said citation. (Can you tell I was an English major?) :)
ReplyDeleteMy kids would eat that, buy my husband would not. He refuses to eat ground turkey, but would eat it with lean ground beef. Might also be good with chicken breast. I love baked pasta dishes.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I linked to your blog in a recent post on mine dealing with motivation.